The Future of AI Unscripted Entertainment

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in growth stage Capital making it by far the largest fund focused on gaming and interactive technology Light speed's Team combines deep expertise in gaming with a global multi-stage investment platform and a culture that truly puts Founders first selected Investments include epic games snap and stability AI as well as game designers and producers who led the creation of titles like fortnite Call of Duty League of Legends valerant Starcraft 2 and many more for more information simply go to gaming. lsvp docomo everyone uh what's up and welcome to the novic gaming podcast I'm your host Alex and this is the interview and insight segment on our show we've welcomed multiple entrepreneurs in the field of AI those building AI power agents for play testing building AI powered Bots for QA building AI models to catch Bots um building AI for NPCs and we hope to bring you guys more content that showcases how gaming

Founders are incorporating AI into their development processes today however we'll be going a bit more Frontier And discussing the Second Use case of AI and games totally new never before had entertainment experiences and as mentioned in our most previous episode on the future of gaming Venture a sector in games that is experiencing Tailwinds in investment are those companies with AI overlap so today I'm joined on air by two folks from a company called evil plan they as you might surmise from their title have a plan to build a first of its kind unscripted fantasy platform what this is and what they're dreaming about and what will come um is we're going to talk about in today's episode and so I have two guests uh the first is Jacob Rapaport founder and CEO of Evil plan Jacob was to no surprise to the many Founders we bring on air uh precocious as a child and joined Microsoft in his teenage years after spending five years at Microsoft he founded several companies in software and successfully exited two of them uh it's a pleasure to have him join our studio today Welcome to the pod Jacob uh

thanks Alex yeah it's a pleasure to be here um yeah I think that pretty much covers it for me I I you know it's been interest an interesting Journey uh you know I pretty much went from building operating systems at Microsoft as a teenager uh you know straight into the wild world of startups I've had a couple of successful exits along the way and really I've just been lucky enough to get the opportunity to fulfill a lifelong dream of working alongside some amazing people like Nico uh as a janitor here for eil play awesome yeah and I'll definitely give you guys an opportunity to share a bit more about yourselves but my second guest who you've already uh called attention to I think his appearance can be more described as a cameo uh he was the voice of novic crypto show for many years um niik RI I'm sure many of you will recognize his iconic accent uh Nico formerly an investor at bit craft join Jacob um and evil plan and is supporting strategy work for the startup uh Nico welcome back thank you Alex it's h fantastic to be here homecoming homecoming

all right I love it um Jacob it's good to have you here for the first time Nico homecoming um Jacob since you're a newbie to our air I to our air show um I know that you just told us a little bit about yourself and your experience but um maybe take this opportunity to walk me through your journey of you know how you landed at Microsoft um some of the companies that you started and what brought you to evil plan sure so I um I ended up going to University pretty young I dropped out uh well I focused on molecular biology and philosophy I ended up dropping out um when I was um pretty young as well I joined Microsoft I think somewhere around 17 and a half maybe maybe just 5 18 uh was there for a number of years uh had the privilege to work alongside a lot of amazing people um invented a bunch of stuff that people are still using today uh left I did a couple other startups uh did a bunch of other interesting technology some I'd say kind of early AIML stuff

uh mostly related to adtech and things like that I uh did a couple companies of my own as you said uh one was more of like a deep Tech kind of uh Enterprise thing uh I exited both of those I was an eir for an ultra high net with family office for a few years uh which was great and then from somewhere around like 2013 2014 started to work on my last company uh we were focused on building a very early like blockchain based tools for Esports platform and I think for me you know what I'd say was it was really the first time that I got to uh you know really kind of fuse a lot of my own passions I've been a lifelong gamer uh and spent a lot of time building a lot of Technology just SOL kind of other people's problems and uh for the first time I really got a chance to you know kind of solve things that I cared about or or work on things that I cared about was super interesting um you know we raised some money uh we wound down in early 2019 and I'd say by uh spring of 2019 I'd already been kind of ideating on on what we're doing now awesome terrific um yeah it's an amazing journey um and such a story also uh you

know multiple angles and dimensions of Entrepreneurship um and so I'm super excited to dive into what you guys are building at evil plan but before we do that um Nico uh what about you uh I would love to hear a little bit about your background in investing I know the audience is familiar with you but what have you been up to over the past two years or so and what are you bringing to evil plan on the operating side um thanks Alex so I spent three years at bigcraft um and what I ended up focusing on was more of the frontier applications to interactive entertainment Frontier technology applications to inter interactive entertainments um basically the way I would summarize it is I was interested in the weird stuff basically um and so I I I let deals um mostly in the crypto space uh around things like fully onchain games and and how we can use these new technologies to build know new types of experiences in those years I get to look at you know some of the best Founders into space the best startups in space

um learned a lot of things and um got some insights into what troubles and what um complexities there are in the interactive entertainment space What challenges many gaming companies have um where indust where consumers were heading where consumer Trends were heading um and when I met Jacob last year he was talking to me about what he was doing at evil plan and um it was a bit of of an epiphany and an answer to many of the challenges and in line with many of the opportunities that I had I've been observing in my years as an investor and so um after what evil plan was doing clicked for me other startups and Investments that I looked at became not not that ex I just I couldn't get this evil plan idea out of my head like what we're doing here to me we're creating a new category new genre of entertainment and the opportunity is

bigger than anything that I've seen before um and once that clicked I just couldn't unsee it and I decided to to make the leap leave my cushy VC job and joining the operator role um where I'm trying to help Jacob and and there a sort of a star team that we have in making this successful awesome yeah I mean I think our Journeys I mean I I very much identify with that mission someone who did something kind of similar um and it's one I definitely know what it's like to fall in love with the team and fall love with the mission and just only want to focus on that and so I'm super excited to talk with you guys about what that mission is um and so that's going to bring us to our first topic which is around Community influence entertainment and so for the audience before we give an overview of Avil plan um Jacob which I'm G to have you do um I want to summarize a couple of key pieces of community influence influence entertainment that have already happened in the world today um and to be clear when I say community

entertainment we mean experiences where the community meaningfully shapes the trajectory of the narrative at a large scale um and there are some phenomenon that happened I think would be useful to educate the audience on in case that people do not know what these things are um and there's and there's four of them uh and so the first is Twitch Plays Pokemon which I'm sure a lot of the audience is familiar with but Twitch Plays Pokemon was an online um and social phenomenon that took place in 2014 basically a bunch of people on Twitch together through input commands and a voice chat played um a version of Pokemon Red and controlled the main character so basically hundreds and hundreds of people online were attempting to catch Pokemon Battle the bosses this led to some of the most hilarious um situations in gaming history such as selling the main Charizard that you had acquired at the very beginning um and it was kind of groundbreaking as a collaborative gameplay experience and highlighted the power of twitch for interactive and community-driven experiences um um the second is bander

snatch um bander snatch is interacted film piece um as part of the Black Mirror franchise um and basically this was released on Netflix in 2018 it allowed viewers to make decisions for the protagonist um and as the mental state of the protagonist deteriorates viewers control his actions this led to multiple story paths with different endings um and that you know was also hailed as regardless of how much of a financial success it was trying to push the boundaries of Storytelling by incorp ating branching narratives and audience interaction to create something unique and immersive um the third is bla ball the founder of which Sam have hosted on air before uh blaz ball was a surreal browser-based fantasy sports game that combined elements of baseball with absurd and satirical and chaotic twists um if you guys want to you can call back to the to listening to the show um players basically participate in a fictional baseball league influenced by fan voting and bizarre events um again very similar community-driven ever

evolving experience that pushed the boundaries of what I guess we consider Sports League simulation uh BL ball unfortunately however is no longer available as the studio stops supporting the game and then finally um there's something called miles massively interactive live experiences I'll actually make a call back to my other homie Aon uh who did a podcast on Miles with Jacob Novak I'm the founder of gen vid gen vid has a couple of interactive series with well-known IP um one that was particularly successful was called the last m which utilized The Walking Dead's um IP and uh it's kind of an interactive show that was hosted over a period of weeks and was told episodically over a period of time so we have Banner snatch Twitch Plays Pokemon blaz ball and miles and to give us some grounding about the kind of community influence experiences we're talking about today and so Jacob I will now pass it to you tell me about what evil plan is can I hijack this for a second and then throw it to Jacob because I really like um it was a great intro Alex and um

it kind of shows a bit my my thinking and how I I got to get so excited about what we're doing here um you know as part as my investing role investor role I dug very deeply into what you just described into Blaze ball um specifically BL ball because like the engagement and excitement around that was was fascinating which plays Pokemon super cool and it just showed me a couple things one was that one of the reasons that people got so excited about that about these things um was because they didn't know what was going to happen because what was happening and what was being decided was like a collective decision and you don't know what other people are going to do and so whatever happens ends up being being new and fresh and that is really exciting we love unscripted things um another reason why I got so successful is because because of people's involvement they felt like a strong tribalism and a buyin

into what was happening one of the great ideas BL ball had was they assigned you to a team and so suddenly you had your team and when you have your team you care what happens to that team and that's why people got so involved and that when they could craft The Narrative of that team they built an even stronger connection with with what was happening and so I was seeing this and then I thought about another entertainment experience I had and many of the people of of my of like of the people I knew had um a couple years earlier that was as unscripted as things could get in terms of movie and television and that was the show Game of Thrones when I was watching Game of Thrones I remember very well like I would sit down for an episode and I would not know whether my favorite character was going to survive that episode and I remember very well after that show next day at school or at work we everyone would be talking about it and I think that um I realized that that unscripted and that having a favorite character and not knowing

whether they were going to survive um really inspired me and showed me that you know these could be some of the best entertainment experience that people had and to me still the best most entertaining scene ever on television um is the Redway because afterwards there were self-help groups of people that were trying to like help each other through through that sea um and I think that it just it doesn't get more entertaining than that and so I I was thinking about sorry for the ramble Alex I was thinking about what what how can we apply some of the really cool things from miles and you know from BL ball and twitch PL Pokemon and and combine that with what I saw in Game of Thrones and I I was thinking about what if we had a Game of Thrones like world with all of these characters that the audience could help um you know could help control um where you have this world that you know um autonomously moves forward and and tells stories um and this is something that Jacob has

been you know thinking a lot about so I'll throw it over to him and and walk let let him walk us through some of his thinking about you know unscripted and fantasy and that kind of stuff yeah no I think like thank you to both of you I think that was a a great a great sort of setup uh you know I want to go back to something that you uh talked about Alex in your intro where you talked about uh storytelling and I think that you you know one of the of the most important things that I've realized over the past I don't know however many years and probably one of the kind of key insights around the company was just understanding that everything really is a story that it's all storytelling you know and so when you sort of step back and you look at all the entertainment that we we engage in in whatever way right whatever form whether it's you know live sports or it's movies or television or you know reality TV shows or whatever it is you can kind of frame all of that as being some mix of you know scripted and unscripted and then

what we would call like reality and and fantasy right and so in that kind of unscripted you know reality bucket you're G to have things like sports and and Esports and many other things and I think what's fascinating to me is that and what a lot of people don't realize is that it really just is a different kind of story right uh what what is life Sports it's it's a story where you're going to pick a side right and you're going to you know uh be all in on that side whether they win or they they lose you know you're going to be with them and it's a story that doesn't really have a beginning or an ending you know uh you're always sort of talking about what's going to happen next or what just happened and and so you're continually kind of both looking forward Looking Backward for a second and looking forward and you know in a way I think what you kind of realize is that the the games themselves are not not really kind of the the the story so much as they are like almost like a plot device like advancing The Narrative right around what's happening and you know when you when you think about people or just

humans it's interesting because a lot of the reasons why we are you know kind of the sort of at least so far the dominant species on the planet uh is because we're very very good pattern recognition machines we're very good at that uh and interestingly and maybe it's just a quirk Quirk of how we work we're very bad at Randomness you know if you give a person a sheet of paper and you say you know put 10 random dots on the sheet of paper most people will start to freeze up around the third fourth dot because they'll just see PS you know they won't know where to make that next St and at the same time while we are so focused on patterns ourselves and pattern recognition and so forth we really like things that are unpredictable we don't like things that are like super random you know if it's just complete complete chaos it's not it's not interesting but if things are sort of surprising and unpredictable that does become interesting and so when you kind of look at you know Sports from that perspective it's really obvious why uh why it's so engaging to you know so many people I think the problem with sports ends up being that this is very difficult it's

very expensive to produce uh you know the capex and Opex around Productions are super high the margins are not you know amazing so you see like a very high top line but you know bottom lines are are hard to deal with and ultimately you know in some sense it's kind of a as as really all entertainment has been a people business you know and in that case uh it's difficult right you have someone at the top of their game like Ronaldo and he's going to play you know once a week few months out of the year and then that's it right so you really can't produce more of that kind of content even though it's very expensive when we think about movies uh it's a kind of a different kind of Storytelling right and we we had more more commonly associate that with storytelling but it has the benefits of being sort of open-ended right anything can happen you know you can be anyone people can die people can be born you know people can grow old and in that way uh you know it has much more flexibility about you know scenarios and you know outer space and forward in Time background time Etc we love that about it the challenge though as sort of eco I think touched on is

that ultimately speaking it's all scripted and as pattern recognition machines we don't like that right when you watch movies when you watch television shows you're thinking like oh I know it's going to happen or oh this is going to happen oh it's so predictable and we talk about that as being a bad show you know I I guess one one thing that I would think about or one way to look at this is that if you think about what makes a show good or what makes a show bad or what makes a story good or bad I would say that it's a little bit like your ability to perceive moments of drama where a moment of drama is something unexpected that's going to happen and for us what's what's ultimately fascinating about this and what we sort of realized was that there's going to be this new category of entertainment that we call unscripted fantasy entertainment and to understand that is going to uh combine uh you know these elements of these other categor so the the best of all possible worlds and in particular uh that category hasn't existed before it's never really been able to exist it's way kind of uniquely

unlocked by Ai and so that form of AI native entertainment that allows us to combine you know kind of the the best of Hollywood with with the unpredictability of sports and the emergent narratives of you know a reality shows and the inter interactivity of gaming that's something just completely new and I think for for us that is what is what is most exciting it's the ability to really focus on something that uh you know is both native to I but but really impossible and has been impossible before we were at this point okay and so evil plan is a AI entertainment company that is aiming to build what you were explaining on kind of like the sports side of live experiences in a more coste effective Universe I think I think it can be Sports experiences I think it can be sorry sorry something like sports experiences yeah I I I would say that I me know if you asked me to sort of summarize the company I would would just say that you know we built the operating

system for the next generation of AI entertainment got it okay and so I think that there's something interesting here and before we go deeper into evil plan 101 like what you guys are building and the first project you guys are starting with I kind of want to spend maybe like five minutes or so kind of on some just some questions about whether or not this kind of thing would have traction and the hypothesis is that that it would be um based on the predilection for people to enjoy live entertainment and live sports reality TV Etc but I think the interesting thing Nico about what you said with the Game of Thrones example is that um George RR Martin actually wrote Game of Thrones in Reverse he wrote it backwards he knew what the end was going to be and therefore he wrote everything um leading up to that end right and so my question to you I guess Nico and I think we talked about little bit of this before is why do you guys think that people at the community scale will be better at storytelling or will through that or through Community influence activity you will create a better more

interesting story than a designer who's perhaps this is their vocation has architected that from scratch like you know George RR Martin architected Game of Thrones to be random and extremely exciting some would say that he is a incredibly brilliant writer do you think that you can create that kind of outcome or do you think that all the outcomes potentially could fall flat or how do you design a system to ensure they don't it's a it's a really good question and so way I would think about we what we're doing is I don't see us like the content that we produce is not competing with the stories that uh like that like incredible writers right um the content that we produce is more akin to the story that you see in the real world where you know when you have a bunch of like athletic organizations competing with each other there's winners there's losers you know these are the and and out of um out of this there are stories that emerge like the way I think about a

lot of sports is sports are essentially human created Created rule sets to enforce drama and when you just like let that happen and let people like try their best Within These environments you get you get great stories um I think that what we're doing is um that's I'm I'm GNA I was going to repeat what I just said before so I'm I'm gonna end it end it with that okay um do you guys I guess think I I you know I think that's the the premise which is which is super interesting and I think it's totally right people are um you know I watched the Super Bowl last night and people are talking about Travis Kelce and his relationship with Taylor Swift and the drama that he's having and everybody's on Instagram and social media um do you think that there's something different today about consumer behavior that makes this particularly exciting for right now um versus something that had was true in a traditional media landscape in the past um is there something that that today that you guys are looking for in terms of what people are doing that has

lend to your hypothesis about um this kind of unscripted fantasy so what I would say is that I think um you know there is this sort of misconception maybe about uh storytelling in general you know we we tend to think about like you see this with with ucg uh uh sorry with ugc platforms a lot right it's like how do you solve a little the variation of kind of the problem that you were talking about and we say okay well you know if if if we can't clone George right uh then maybe we can make a million georgees right and and then somehow we're going to produce something interesting out of that and I I think that the end the issue ends up being that first of all you kind of have Discovery problems around it right when when there's a bazillion hbos or whatever like how do you even know where to find you know the Good Game of Thrones versus the bad Game of Thrones or whatever uh most of those games of thrones are not going to be that great and I think that the Challenge end to that we're really you know very few of

us are are actually good storytellers right uh very few of us are even storytellers let alone good good storytellers and uh you know but at the same time we're all story consumers we love good stories right there was a um I don't know if you know this but back in like' 82 when uh EA was announcing themselves they put out this ad and the title of the ad was uh can a computer make you cry it was a really interesting question and uh Spielberg had had seen that ad and it had this very profound effect on him you know and uh later he he would go on to try to I think he did it some tried to do some games with Sierra and some other things and and we gave a a talk not not too long ago and he mentioned it which is kind of interesting it's like you know 20 years later right that this thing had stuck with him and I think you know for me that that question of you know can a computer make you cry is is the question right uh right now we have and up until this time we've really used technology uh you know to deliver the stories that

we make right you know to your point but we also can't clone George and and we don't really have a million Georges right and so if you kind of think about that question in a different way what I would say is that if we all love a good story and we know that a good story can make you cry right then sort of the answer to that question is yeah a computer can make you cry but uh if we build a computer that's a story machine right and what we've built this entire time are basically calculators you know and whether that is a uh you know a deep seek or or or open AI or or any of the frontier Technologies you know they're tools they're not they're not story machines and you know I think for for us uh to kind of go back you know what what is what is something like ai ai native entertainment how would I Define that right broadly and what I would say is that it's it's storytelling as n said in a slightly different way right it it has these qualities that are per you know perpetual it's going to be real time it's going to be interactive the the

actual underlying story whether it's a sport or game of thrones or you know a Pokemon Adventure or a a reality show is less I would say it's not it's not that it's unimportant but the more important thing is that uh you know it has these qualities to it like whatever story you're telling is told in this way and so you know for us I I I would say that we've we've realized that and been focused on building that kind of story machine that Perpetual real time interactive story machine you know we call it a prism um and for us that is the way in which we're going to tell you know stories in this in this new way uh the only thing I would add is that you know you asked how do you know to some degree you know what what the right I guess what the right plot twist or what the right answer is or you know how how can you tell something in a way that that you know a professional story tell everyone tell and and to Nico's point I would say that it's not really a competition in that way you know people play a lot of different kinds of games people uh watch a lot of different kinds

of shows and I don't think this is a question about trying to you know erase something or displace something in any way I think it's that that that kind of content meaning all forms of existing entertainment there there just isn't enough good versions of it if you think about what I'm saying I guess a different way would be if I were to describe to you a a scene right out of something like you know I don't know a western and I would say there's a train it's moving M through the desert there's a Sheriff there's a bunch of passengers and there's a bunch of you know outlaw bandits riding towards it and you would be like okay interesting you want to know what happens next if I told you that what happened was the sheriff killed all the bandits he saved the day you'd be like that's a good story if I told you that the bandits killed all the passengers it would be sad but that would also be good St if I told you that you know the train was disabled and and they ended up overcoming adversity to survive in the middle of the desert that would also be a good story no matter what I'm going to tell you it's going to be a good story and partly that's because it's all unexpected all

possibilities are there when Nico mentioned the red wedding scene I think what's interesting is that even though that was sort of the best scene in the show it also kind of ruined the show because every moment after that you were sort of sitting there as a viewer wondering if this is was this is the thing that was going to happen next and that in a way is the problem with scripted content is that it takes possibilities off the table right uh you know even if you surprise the audience it's very difficult from that point almost impossible to surprise them again uh another example I'd say very quickly would be like the movie the six cense right I don't know if you remember it but you had this amazing plot twist at the end and I don't want to spoil it for for anyone who possibly hasn't seen it but there's this big plot twist at the end that director he had a problem right his problem was that every time he made another movie uh people would go and expect and wait sit there and wait through the whole film for the last you know two minutes where he's going to have his big plot twist reveal thing and in a sense uh you know even his form of unpredictability in the same way that the Red Wedding itself was UN unpredictable became predictable H interesting yeah and I

think actually like I think to my to answer my own question um you know about is there something today about consumer behavior that makes this exciting I think you have a point there where people have a fascination of figuring well what else could have been you see that with a lot of the Marvel Universe of the shorts that they've made of you know what if instead of Iron Man dying this happened or what if instead of Wonder Woman being a man she was a woman or what if this person was this ethnicity versus that ethnicity um and something else that's interesting is that you just said that you know people don't are great great consumers of stories but they might not be amazing storytellers themselves I think that actually people probably can be really good storytellers but even in like little microcosms and I don't know if you guys are following like the Blake Livy Justin baldon like smear campaign stuff but I think that that is itself it's so interesting because there's basically an online Warfare of like social media tweets quotes videos fake accounts to ruin the other people's reputations but people are participating in that and creating their own like little mini tidbits out of like some

they saw they saw Justin Balon at a coffee shop um four people in New York and then they were like he was totally meeting with somebody and this is what happened they propagate that story online um and obviously this is awful because it's happening to real people um however I could definitely see an entertainment case where that kind of fandom of like tiny little Snippets of moments of influencing um the mainline narrative um could be interesting um at the public level one way I would think about that and I think it's a fantastic example right is to think about the fact that in that case uh the audience is not responsible for the outcome right yes they're not they're not in charge they don't have to be responsible you know if it it doesn't have to end certain way or or different way and I think uh in that way it's very similar to what we're describing is that you know it's less about traditional storytelling you know we it's funny because we think about it as a creative exercise right but if you think about it we use a lot of like

construction terms we talk about foundations we talk about framing you know it sounds like we're building a house more than we're we're making a painting or something and in that way I I think that there's this problem where you know again we're we're we're pattern recognition machines we think in terms of patterns and so if I tell you if I ask you to tell me a story you're going to think well there has to be a beginning a middle and end you know I need to I need to maybe do some foreshadowing in the beginning so that the end makes sense or you know I need this thing to make sense of that thing and you know I need to show a a a shot of a revolver on the on the nightstand even though there's no reason to show that shot I have to show it to you now because later otherwise this other thing won't make sense right that's our problem we kind of can't get out of our own heads and so to your point you know if people are not responsible for that if they just are contributing you know more like uh more like influencing in a way right uh nudging you know or contributing small bits then there is no there is no uh need for them to understand how all of these you know fit together and so and they just

Naturally Fit together yeah yeah and I think that's to the main point of it's like you know you're talking to your Game of Thrones thing but it's like someone needs to potentially architect the subplots and the and how they fit together but people can still influence like the micro dramas and the tinier things um Nico sorry go ahead no no um so just to add to that point um you asked about indications that this is where consumers were heading and I think what Jacob just said is also really important about what we're doing I think that one of the the challenges that we have as a gaming industry is that people seem to want to try new games less and less and there's this trend that like I just call it people are getting lazier and they either play games that they've been playing for 20 years or they want to sit back and you know actually not play and just watch a streamer that plays a game um I don't know recently some stat came out that like 50% of Gamers watches games they actually don't play and and to me that is a trend that is like it has been growing over the past five years and I I just I don't see

any reason why it would stop and so I think what we're doing is we're allowing we're giving consumers the option to you know sit back right if if you're participating in twitch P Pokemon like you could just watch it because it's entertaining right but you can also like type and you can orchestrate and so these like having these types of experiences just allows for many ways to interact with the content and I think that is this something that uh we'll probably see more of and something that I as an investor get really excited about okay awesome all right so we've talked about the dream um but let's maybe now we're going to back up and you know get grounded and talk about kind of how you'll begin the dream um and we're going to definitely talk about some of the business model implications of having um people that are observing versus engaging um but tell me a little bit about the first project that you guys are going to start with um evil plan is building an un scripted AI driven fantasy platform uh what's the

first thing that I'm going to experience and how do I experience it well I guess what I would say is that um you know where where we are kind of right now uh there there's not a a ton I'm I'm able to get into detail around specifics of that but what I would say is that uh to a large degree we think that this is in general pretty transformative right and so when we think about uh the kinds of things we're talking about here different ways to tell stories different ways to um you know interact and engage and so forth uh a lot of a lot of what we're working on and focusing on is is really just thinking around trying to solve these problems right uh there are issues with you know how we tell stories there are issues with the ability to scale the these kinds of uh you know content uh and I guess the truth is you know if I'm going to be really candid what I would say is that we don't really fully understand you know we we have a or at

least yet right uh you know we're sort of just starting to try to answer some really hard questions in the in just the entertainment industry in general but also specifically in gaming you know so for us um it it it's sort of a a a process I guess but I suppose the way that I think about this is that you know we we came together as a company because we saw that there were these big problems right and that a lot of those problems touched kind of all of us directly and so we have thoughts and we have ideas and you know we have things that we've built uh over the past several years that we are you know kind of excited introduced to people but I guess I I don't know that part of it is being able to say it is this or it isn't that very specifically I think a big part of this is the idea that we want audiences to help shape these things like that in a sense is is maybe a a different way to think about it that it's less so about us being prescriptive

which is more the traditional model of how this happens and it's more about allowing for or or uh inviting audiences to be more kind of co-creators okay so in that regard though I guess there must be something that you guys are building and Co that I would be a co-creator as an audience member a first product a minimum viable product that um as a startup you guys will be building um do you have an approach or something that you guys are starting with that lends itself to the hypothesis and a vision for how I would co-create alongside of it whether that be on my phone on a TV how do I interact with it how long do I interact with it is it a sit down thing like a BL ball where I come in every season and put in some inputs is it very regular I guess I'm trying to Envision what the consumer experience might be like for if I was going to play an evil plans game project yeah I mean I I I would think about um and I guess we can talk a

little bit about kind of what what the first concept is I suppose but um I I guess to step back a little bit we talked about kind of you know sort of sports in the in the beginning right and I I would sort of start there um you know look anytime somebody's GNA say to you hey we're inventing a completely new you know genre of this or that or or new category uh it's going to feel a little bit like an ocean and you know it is right it is an ocean uh and so for us it was a question of you know where where do we sort of how do how do we boil this you know and you know the answer is always one cup at a time for us that was starting with with sports um when you think about all the different kinds of content and stories uh you know and how like to your points like how how things work or not work um or how a story unfolds or not folds the the the question for us really became how do we give people you know to your point earlier like kind of enough context quickly where they they can have some kind of you know impact in in whatever

way right and for us that was starting with something very very simple right and so if you think about um like all the within the World of Sports right what's interesting about it for us is that it sort of simplifies a lot of things right the amount of you know for example dialogue uh is is less right the amount of uh you know physical interaction and kind of like sort of overt competition is easier to understand right you know Str like the ability to have a strategy and understand how you know you can influence that strategy becomes easier to understand right from a consumer perspective and so you know what's for us I think the the starting point was thinking more about like a like more of a a simplified combat sport right what's interesting about uh you know fighting in general is that it it's just very simple like like I I don't have to understand anything about what's going on I don't have to understand anything about the background of you know the characters I don't have to understand their lore I don't have to know anything about the rules you know to to Neo's

point I could just look at two characters uh you know engaging in in kind of combat and immediately understand what's going on and orientate myself you know in terms of like how you're going to experience it you know I I I don't think it's necessarily uh substantially different from what you'd imagine right I think that it's more about um it's more about what you know it's less about us trying to dictate to you if this makes sense right like to kind of Nico's point it's less about us trying to say you know you have to do it this way or have to do it that way I think it's more about you being you being able to um you know participate in in a in a story right and so again I would say that many of the many of the things you might imagine uh are true are are true you know and many things you'd expect are are going to be the way you'd expect and I don't think it's I think it's less about that it's less about trying to get you to do something different if you will right from a a behavioral perspective and sense but more about trying to trying more to like

lean into the behaviors you have now lean lean into the way that you would think about it okay um so you're going to start with this um this I guess a to the sports sense of of some sort of fighting or combat um could be boxing could be anything else kind of entertainment experience um and it seems to me like actually from a lot of the examples that we've discussed that IP is really important to this right it's the Raiders it's the Kansas City Chiefs it's Game of Thrones it's Twitch Plays Pokemon um are you guys planning on starting with an IP that you think is going to have people be automatically invested in those characters um and if not how are you thinking about um the IP overlay of you know perhaps it's the dynamic of fighting but who is fighting yes so I think that's I think it's a really interesting question and um I think the answer to that actually kind of goes back to uh what you were talking about at the top which was BL ball right one of the things that was super I think uh compelling about BL

ball to myself and also Nico was that they did not create waterfall characters right um you know for for people who are not familiar with BL ball it was basically text based you know was pretty much played on Twitter for the most part in a sense uh and they just you know put the name of a baseball player and you know like it would be like stammy hot dog figures or I think I'm getting this name wrong a couple years but uh you know something like that and the community was really the one that stepped in and created The Narrative and created the characters and I think in a lot of ways what that demonstrated is that we've sort of made a mistake a little bit in entertainment and and maybe this is a different way to to kind of explain your or to get at your earlier question right which is in entertainment and in games in particular we've had this idea of how to create you know worlds right and that that World building sort of starts with a very small group of people years in advance right and they try to think about you know what the world should look like and how it should work and and you know these are the characters and these are their back stories and and and so forth and this is the way they're going to interact and blah blah blah blah and I

think what bla Paul demonstrated is that you can just really turn that on its head you know you don't you don't actually need to figure out and you don't really even need necessarily a third-party IP like the Raiders or like Twitch Plays Pokemon or whatever it's certainly I think nobody would argue that it's not or it can't be an accelerate but I think what bla Bal showed is that turns out that when you put when you give people Blank Space right when you give them the ability to you know tell story uh you know or at least contribute to it they will and so I think our our view is that this is more about how more about that that BL ball has demonstrated in a lot of ways uh what is what is what is a I guess you said almost like a latent ability uh in people right that if you create a a enough of a frame and a construct they will fill in all the things that we would normally spend you know years and you know in some cases millions of dollars trying to create on their behalf maybe Alex an additional point

there um one of the things I love about games and the gaming industry as a whole is how many Dynamics we can see in games and we can draw par parallels from two other Industries and other situations and so one of the things that always been true within gaming is that um whenever there's a major platform shift any IP that is successful and dominates there tends to be an IP that's native to that new platform um in a shift from you know PC console to mobile the first successful mobile games were not ports from PC console IP they were Angry Words Right games that were designed for that new platform and so very similarly we are creating a new type of entertainment um where the Dynamics like the the the progress of Storytelling is is unscripted and fantasy based if we were to use existing IP we would be limited in the kind of things we can do we'd be restricted in in the kinds of stories we can tell when you watch a Batman movie you know that

there's going to be a next Batman movie and so you know that Batman is not going to die right that is something that we don't want to be restricted by again which brings me back to the the example of Game of Thrones right I think the best stories are the stories that are unrestricted in what happens in in what can happen um and that is exactly what we can do and so the strongest Stories the best stories the best IP universes that will be created within this new category of entertainments will be IB universes that are created natively for this new category of entertainments and just for that point very quickly like you know you you had asked earlier for example like how how long would you would you spend right and I think I think a different way to think about what I'm trying to say is that we don't know how long you would spend it's how long you would spend right if there was something that was if there was a world and that world was perpetual and that world was occurring in real time and that world gave you the ability to interact you know and you had the and that was on your you know I don't know

your you know kind of current current devices using you know all the methods that you would normally expect uh would exist uh then I don't know you know we think that some people will spend a lot of time in these things we think that some people will spend very little time in these things and that both answers are okay uh you know a different way to think about it is that um I just think about this for myself maybe you know I I have been a lifelong gamer as I mentioned but it's been a while since I've had time to play games when the switch came out I went out and bought it like a lot of my friends I was very excited to play breath of the wild I was super excited about that game I played it for about 45 minutes I have not picked it up since it's not a reflection of the game the game is amazing right my problem was that when I looked at it two weeks later I had no idea like I loaded the safe point I had no idea where like where I was what I was doing there what was going on right I was like I was like okay well I guess I could go all the way back to wherever the hell I was in the beginning and then you know I I just never end up picking it up in a multiplayer game I have sort of a variation of that problem right I

don't have 10,000 hours to go learn valerant right or to get good at it I you know maybe I played csgo or I played OverWatch whatever it was that that I played and now you know that that's the one I've spent time in and so it becomes troubling because you know if you show me a new IP even if it's amazing even if it's an incredible game there's so much uh there's so much required of me right like time Focus energy Etc uh in order to you know be good at it in order to you know sort Drive the story like to be the the battery if you will that in a multiplayer sense you know what's going to happen I'm going to find two hours maybe that I could play this new game I'm gonna get yelled at by 12 year olds I'm not going to yell back because you know I'm I'm the adult right and and I'm you know I'm going to be like well I'm trying to be on the objective or I'm trying to you know like I don't know what's going to go what's going to happen and that's that's not going to be a very filling fulfilling entertainment experience and so I guess like the the it's not to it's not to try to be vague it's just to say that like the point in a way is not to is not to do those things right is to give you the ability

to have something that you can plug in and plug out of right in the same way that um if I don't if I don't catch the big game on on the weekend right uh you know I don't know if you're a sports fan I mean I am but you know it's like if I don't if I don't catch like the big game that's okay like it's okay you know it doesn't matter it's fine right I can uh you know I can catch it next week right or I can spend I can decide to take my weekend and spend time with it both are okay okay yeah I think that that makes a lot of sense and I think you know this is it's a very interesting thing from the consumer side about what someone would want to enjoy and how people want to engage with entertainment um and you know as we talked about in the as you know having IP you know something like BL ball which kind of created its own native IP from scratch um and so I kind of want to in the last like 15 minutes of our episode shift to you know this clearly this could be like an interesting consumer entertainment experience but is this an interesting business um um and to quote something here uh BL ball ran for three years it

launched in 2020 and shut down in 2023 um as someone who's obviously had the the founder of the company on air um at at the time that BL ball was really hot it was an amazing game um however they found it really really hard to support due to the high cost of requirements of developing this game um and so they did have their own IP but it was again a very small fan base um dedicated fan base uh but they didn't they had struggled very much with Mod ization uh and so I'm guessing for your for your guys's question beginning with a non um IP licensed IP and building your guys's own IP from scratch um what do you guys think is realistically to start the addressable market for a game like that the first one that evil plan will be making and kind of what business model do you approach are you do you think that you're going to tack onto it um just given the success of something like um you know looking at the different models of genin and looking at what happened BL ball so we start like when we describe

what we're doing we're talking about AI native entertainment and I think that means a lot of different things to a lot of different people um but when I hear AI native entertainment I think about entertainment where the every additional unit of content is produced by Ai and in traditional forms of entertainment every unit of additional content requires human work so if you think about a video game every like every level every Quest requires work from a human you think about a a like the sports sports League you know every game requires work from a human similarly every every new episode requires work from a human if you're going to use AI in in many of the ways that we see it today you'll see that AI is just helping um things being done faster but at the core there's still humans making decisions and when I think about AI native development I think about um you know making it so that the

AI decides what the content is and that is a fundamental shift in how entertainment like is produced I think that like you all you both both of you will notice and most of the audience will notice but most of the decision making in IP or like entertainment products is a cost like risk or a cost benefit analysis and how risky it is to make something and how much we expect to make from it you know if at most of the big AAA games they are you know they're sequels of existing games or their reboots right and and the same is said within the like the movie and TV and and show landscape right all of the major IPS are like there's almost almost no major um new IPS that are being developed just because it is super expensive to make because there's so many you know humans involved there's so much work involved um and the the risk is just it's not very high the risk or the the potential benefit um is just you know it's so risky because you don't know if it's going to hit or not the

moment you can replace humans with AI the moment you can truly have ai native entertainment that is like it just fundamentally changes everything right what if you can create like a new IP for you know what a fraction of the cost of what it would traditionally cost um it just changes the way you try do experiments it changes the the kind of products that you make it changes you know how you look at small markets um and so from that point of view I think that um this is is really revolutionary it's one of the reasons why I'm so excited about what we're doing yeah I think I would just add that um you know when you I said earlier that we were you know you could describe the company as having you know built an operating system for this new form of entertainment and and that's very true uh you know I would say that in a lot of ways this is sort of you know stealing from the best right uh if if you want to understand kind of what we're doing or how we're thinking about it from a business perspective uh you know to your question about kind of original Ip I would just think about epic right you

know epic did unreal right and unreal at the time was you know Rel was pretty successful right but they did something very very smart you know they used that as an opportunity to get Unreal Engine essentially as a free output right and Unreal Engine allowed them both to have the time uh to you know kind of find what was going to be the best version in a sense of of that online 3D multiplayer game which turned out not to be unreal it turned out to be fortnite right and along the way they were able to uh you know and I think in some sense naturally create organically create an ecosystem around the engine right that help them uh find find ultimately help buy them the time in a sense to find that IP right and so I would say that that in many ways this is very similar you know we we created uh prism we Ed that to get prism OS as a free output from that process uh and that you know an OS like like any OS has apps or apps or cold prisms we expect that an ecosystem will you know build around that over time and for us the point of

it is that a a prism or prism OS can solve a almost a very fundamental problem which you've you've touched on in a lot of different ways which is really just that we don't currently have the way to make the content that audiences demand we don't have it right we can try uh but we don't have a good way and so we've tried to Sol this in one way we Tred to stall them another way you know ugc or whether it's you know different different approaches it's not they've not really worked right and I think the idea here is to solve that problem you know there I said at one point that there are not enough good storytellers in the world right and that is really a problem it's a problem of scale in a lot of ways right and of the good storytellers they just don't have enough time to tell all the stories that you want to hear right and so this is one way and I would say is maybe possibly even the only way that we're going to solve that problem okay so for you guys this prism OS part is part of the business model because you'd plan on potentially licensing the prism B the prism I guess

OS itself in a similar to an engine business and so I guess my question was are you guys thinking about monetizing content or you guys it sounds like you're might potentially monetizing infrastructure um and so that's kind of I guess the question is you know is it when you make this first fighting game experience or what whatever it may be um are you is that where the value is coming from because it's obviously there's cost reduction right but then there's inflows and so I'm kind of wondering and curious about how you guys are thinking about inflows um and it sounds like it's mostly infrastructure rather than content side no I don't think you have to make a choice I think I think it's just sort of a false choice you know it's like you're you're going to make a uh a product that has its own commercials right and in in doing so you have a platform right you can make content on that platform you can open that up to other people that could look like co-production that could like an AWS model I mean there's all sorts of ways in which you could do it I I don't

think that I can give you a specific example as to like what is the best way because we don't know you know what I would say is that uh we are going to you know explore and and there are lots of options and we'll focus on on the best one for me I I think the you know the most important thing that I I think about really with this company is really not so much any anything we're talking about here but really just the team you know the the team for the company is pretty incredible uh one thing that I find really kind of amazing is not just that you know we have these like experts you know in 20 years and like all the all the things we're talking about right whether it's like Esports or Sports entertainment or actual entertainment or you know gaming and so on so forth It's that they you know I didn't recruit a single person every single person on our team asked to be here right and I think the reason why they asked to be here is because they all fundamentally want to change the world but more importantly and I think maybe to your earlier questions they want to change it right now you know they don't want to do it in 10 years or

15 years or 20 years right they want to they want to be able to solve these things that have been problems for them and or pain points for them in their own careers and in a lot of ways you know I I don't know that any idea is you know perfect exactly uh and I'm not suggesting that this is but I think it's it's for all of us maybe the the best shot we've seen uh from our different perspectives at being able to solve the kinds of things that we've been talking about which you know frankly are are huge issues okay and that was actually going to lead to one of my next questions about building the this the organization that you guys have and you know I had a question in here about who are the right people to bring on board to the Endeavor it sounds like you didn't have to bring anybody on board they all just voluntarily join the join the ship but um I do have a question around um the actual you know as we said before one of the problems that you guys are trying to solve is do fundamentally believe that the storytellers do not have enough

manpower or hours to tell all the stories that everybody wants to hear and consume and therefore Nico to your point you actually believe that it's not AI in the process and human in the loop you mean human out of the loop AI drives the process entirely they make the shot calls Etc and so but as you're beginning this journey right because I presume that you're at the at the beginning and there's lots of talks about where ai ai is going and what it will be in the next five 10 years but for right now I assume that you want to hire some sort of storytellers at the beginning of the process to architect some sort of you know the first fighting game that you guys are talking about um is it challenging to hire any like narrative directors or people who want to tell stories who know that their stories are going to be influenced by a crowd um can you tell me a little bit about um recruiting those types of people um yeah I mean I'm happy to so uh the the answer to your question I mean is succinct answer is no it's not hard um you know I think that the the the truth is that

everybody in the games industry has always wanted to make you know a beautiful game they've always wanted to make to tell a beautiful story they've always wanted to do these things and to Nico's Point why don't we right why don't we make the beautiful games we want or tell the wonderful Stories We want and the answer is because we can't afford to right would just can't and and so you know I think the the way that I would think about this is much less about you know a restrictive version but more about just a fundamental unlock right it's it's like if you want to tell the world's most amazing story right and you know that there's no way you're ever going to get the resources to tell that story you want because it's just too cost prohibitive in one way or another this is a way that you can tell that story and I I think in a lot of sense it's more like uh I guess you'd say that it's sort of turning it more into

science than art right which is the science of Storytelling you know how how do we tell stories so to kind of go back to what I was saying before when you think about you know can a computer make you cry and what does it mean to build a story machine that is in a certain way thinking about it more as Science and Engineering in the sense uh and less about um you know the Reliance on a on a specific uh person to be able to you know kind of shoulder that entire world got it okay um well we are wrapping up on the end of our episode and I want to ask you guys two um quick conclusionary questions uh Jacob perhaps you would uh lead us off here is there um if you had to name one risk the biggest existential risk to evil plans plan uh what is that to you and and why I mean I suppose I suppose that that the you know the right answer would be to say that uh you know there's there's

some risk that we are uh you know directionally wrong right uh that somehow we've we've just gotten it wrong um you know my view there is that all the available evidence everyone I've ever spoken to everything tells me that that is not the case I think uh you know and so there's there's far more indicating that that that we are directionally correct and not uh I'd say the other you know the other thing that I suppose would be a a risk to the company would just be that you know we like all companies that uh we don't execute correctly right and I think for me um you know the answer there is really just the team look you know I I can't give you all the answers to exactly how this is going to work or that's going to work or what's good or what's bad or what you know I I don't know I mean I think when you when you do something transformative versus uh something else you know by definition you don't really fully understand uh all of these things yet uh but if I had to you know go to go to battle with a team of people that I trust to be able to

figure out what the right thing to do is to understand you know what how to make the right trade-offs and to execute it correctly I wouldn't feel I mean I I'm like privileged frankly to be around uh the people that that I'm with and and to uh you know frankly it's very um I mean I don't know maybe moving is the right word but it's it's pretty it's pretty impressive to me personally uh to have people who I respect uh you know want to drop whatever they're doing and and come work on this and so you know I I think for for me that that is the that is both in a sense you know probably the most true the most true risk but also the reason why I feel the most confident about what we're doing awesome yeah I think that and I think that is really moving and it is really exciting um but thank you for sharing I guess some of the things that you could so I think always you know when you're at a company you're thinking about you know what is the risk here what could go wrong and then obviously how do you play defense against that uh so that was I think sort of the the impetus for the question and now Nico I'm gonna ask you this question because

you're good at this and you like these kinds of questions but you know paint me a picture of a strange and dystopian future where this is the primary form of content um the you know the literally the way that people interact with entertainment and what does that look like to you asking me to paint a dystopian picture you're just asking me to you know talk about the future that I Envision um right which is why I gave you the question so you're putting me on the spot here um I I generally think that um everything today um in entertainment is fighting for attention and I think that humans the best a human can do is um next to being healthy working out and um you know strengthening their body it is strengthening their mind I think that meditation is a superpower and humans that you know don't meditate will just start to see their attention span shrink and shrink and shrink and so I think that um as content becomes better and

more ubiquitous I think that humans are at risk to fall in this trap of just permanently being stimulated from each side and always having something that's super entertaining and super engag engaging at their fingertips and I think that we will have to find a right balance between you know healthy look staring at a wall doing nothing and just controlling our mind and engaging in some of that fantastic content that is is coming towards us got it okay well that is very dystopian and I like it um all right folks um this has been fantastic uh and I you know it's been so awesome to hear about something that's so Frontier and and you know I guess to some to some wild out there but to you guys you know right around the corner and something you guys are so inspired by um it was great to learn about the company that you guys are building today um the software that you're building as as well as the the first content experience um but as always um this is

the end of our episode and if you have feedback or ideas please hit me up at Alexander nvic.org evilplan in.com or Nico evilplan in.com you know welcome to reach out perfectly happy to uh to chat awesome okay well thank you guys so much um it's always a pleasure uh Nico uh thank you for your cameo and uh that's it with that we're out bye everybody than Alex thanks Alex bye if you enjoyed today's episode whether on YouTube or your favorite podcast app make sure to like subscribe comment or give a fstar review and if you want to reach out or provide feedback shoot us a note at podcast at nov. or find us on Twitter and Linkedin

plus if you want to learn more about what novic has to offer make sure to check out our website www.nic.edu and advisory Services again that is www.nic.edu [Music]